Family Camping

It is now finally summer. At least, the calendar tells us so. The weather this spring has been frightful—cold and dull and stingy of heat. But now that the sun has decided to shine, my thoughts turn to camping—that great summer pastime we indulged in with our friends and our kids.

When you have four kids, camping is pretty much the only family holiday you can afford. That was certainly the case for us, and for most of our friends in Herbert. We were all young parents with small children. No one had disposable funds. For most of us, there were more days at the end of the month than money. Fortunately, Jack and I had a supportive bank manager and a line of credit. We got by.

But when summer would finally show up in Saskatchewan, thoughts turned to “the lake”. In Saskatchewan, holidays were taken at “the lake”. There are thousands and thousands of them in Saskatchewan, but they are known collectively as “the lake”. Sometimes, if you were flush, it was “the cabin at the lake”. For the rest of us, it was simply “the lake” and we would camp.

Our first tent was a smelly old canvas job Jack’s parents gave us. One season of its musty walls and space-intruding centre pole convinced us that we needed to get a better tent. And so, we invested in a gigantic dome tent that you could easily park a Hummer in (although I don’t know why you’d want to—Hummers pretty much defeat the purpose of tents).

We loved that tent—it was a bugger to put up but you could stand in it to get dressed. For those who’ve struggled to zip up jeans while kneeling with heads brushing a tent roof, you will know what a luxury this was. It comfortably housed the six of us—but when four of the persons are under four feet high, there is space left over for essentials such as books, board games, pillows, the dog, etc.

We often went camping with Dee and Rollie and their kids. Sometimes Duane and Natalie and their gang would come as well. On one memorable weekend, Herbertians pretty much took over the campground at Anglin Lake. The Little Moron Club terrorized the campsites, the adults sat in front of fires and drank coffee. I recall Claire’s husband Hank consulting his bug book so he could tell us what kind of critter was biting, stinging or crawling on us at any particular time.

We would take the kids to the beach—a miniscule sandy cut in a grassy bank—where they would splash like maniacs and try to drown one another. We’d sit in the sun (no worries about skin cancer then—we were working on our tans), peer over sunglasses from time to time to yell at some over-rambunctious kid, and wade in when we got too hot. Whenever one of us would lumber into the water, the kids would shriek with delight. They would leap like porpoises, sending silver arcs of water at whatever hapless adult whale was wallowing in the shallows. Then one of the kids would invariably step on a sharp rock, or get an elbow in the eye, and crying would ensue. Things would calm down for a few moments and then ramp up again. It was fun times.

One year Jack bought a canoe. It was a beautiful old Chestnut Prospector canvas-and-cedar job. We have it yet—it sits perched high in the eaves of our woodshed, missing its canvas and gunwales, waiting for a chance to hit the water again. For us, camping was never the same. The canoe meant we could skim out over the water. We could go fishing. We could explore little bays and streams and channels. The lake was ours.

It also functioned quite well as a car-top carrier. It held an amazing amount of stuffables—sleeping bags, packs, life-jackets—anything that could be jammed, squeezed, wedged or wadded was bungeed securely in the upside-down canoe. That left more room for the boys to fight over on the trip up.

Sometimes Jack and I would wake up before the kids. We’d dress in silence and steal away for an early morning paddle, pinning a note to the tent door for whatever other adults were camping nearby. We’d sneak down to water, where the upturned canoe was waiting.

Those early morning paddles, sans kids, were bliss. The lake was usually like glass—the wind would come up later in the day, but early mornings were invariably calm. The sun would already be high in the sky—summer days on the northern parkland are long. We would watch the pelicans take off—like leftover pterodactyls, they would bounce on big feet before taking flight, their impossibly long wings whooshing the air above our heads. Nearby loons dove for fish, coming up far away from where they’d slipping under the pewter-coloured water. Sometimes a bear would lumber down to the water from the surrounding bush. In a silent canoe, you are one with the lake and all the creatures who call it home.

One morning, as we were heading back from a paddle, we noticed a motorboat (the bane of our canoeing existence) circling something in the water. The boat’s motor roared as it leaned into its own wake, chopping the water into spume and wave.

Jack, impatient with motorboaters at the best of times, uttered some words that I won’t repeat here. “Let’s go see what they’re doing,” he said. “Okay!” I said, following orders. As we paddled their way, we could see a small black head in the middle of the boat’s wave-wake. “Those bastards!” said Jack. “They’ve got a loon.”

For some reason, when some people get out into nature with an internal combustion engine at their disposal, they like to run over animals. Cars, trucks, ATV’s, snowmobiles, boats—it doesn’t matter. Any motorized chassis will do the job, as will any critter unfortunate enough to be in the way. These morons were running down a loon. The bird, frantic to fly away, couldn’t get off the water. So it had to keep diving for cover. And wherever it came up, the boat was waiting for it.

“Paddle harder!” Jack hollered. Usually I would bristle at such bluster, but this time I just dug in and pulled. We made that canoe hum over the water. The boat’s driver saw us coming and hit the throttle, pulling out of the choppy trough he’d been ploughing up in his efforts to run down the loon.

“They’re making a run for it,” shouted Jack, paddling like a madman. “Head them off!”

“What?” I said, turning to look at him. “Are you nuts? He’s got a big motor! We’re in a canoe, in case you haven’t noticed. We’re supposed to outrun a motorboat?”

“PADDLE!” Jack hollered again. “If you’d just shut up and paddle, we can catch them.”

Now I was miffed—an early morning paddle had resulted in me being hollered at, something I didn’t appreciate. However, I decided to take the moral high road, so I paddled. If Jack was bonkers enough to think we could outrun a motorboat, I wasn’t going to be the one to screw it up.

But Jack’s blood was up—he was a paddling machine. “Harder!” he kept yelling. “Harder! Paddle harder!”

I thought about shrieking that I was paddling as hard as I could and he could shove it if that wasn’t good enough, but thought I’d save my breath. So I paddled. And darned if we didn’t get to the dock at the same time the motorboat did.

As I grabbed the rubber fender and halted what was a pretty fast landing after all that paddling, Jack leaped out of the canoe and stood on the dock, brandishing his paddle, and dressing down the boat crew of four guys old enough to know better. They replied with some rude words of their own, but you could tell their hearts weren’t in it. Obviously they were ashamed and embarrassed to be caught in such an act, AND outrun by a canoe.

After a few more salty exchanges, Jack shook his head in disgust. By this time, I’d crawled out of the canoe. My arms were like lead. Jack threw the paddles and extra life-jacket onto the dock and heaved the canoe out of the water onto his shoulders. He marched the canoe all the way to the campsite, where the boys were just waking up and Rollie and Dee were pouring coffee. Rollie went with Jack to the general store to report the boaters. I had to hold my coffee cup with both hands, so tired were my arms.

The rest of the day wasn’t nearly as eventful.

Fishing was another activity we enjoyed while camping. The boys insisted on giving the fish we caught names (the name Frank was always awarded to the first fish caught). But that didn't stop them from crowding around Jack as he cleaned them, fighting over who got the heads, upon which they would enact all kinds of unspeakable things.

Cooking with fire was also fun. Even though we had Jack’s parents’ ancient Coleman camp-stove (still functioning, by the way), we preferred to fry bacon and eggs, boil coffee, and sear wieners over open flames. The soot and black bits added to the flavour. And we could sit around the flames as darkness fell, poking them to see sparks rise in the night air. Marshmallows were torched. The hard black crust would be allowed to cool. Then you’d slip it off, revealing the sweet goo beneath, which would be thrust in the flames again to repeat the process. A good roaster could get three or four searings out of a single marshmallow. However, after an unfortunate incident involving a burning marshmallow and human hair (I won't say whose), no one was allowed to cool the little fireballs off by waving sticks in the air any more.

What I remember about camping are the smells. Wood-smoke, pine resin, that lakey-water smell, spicy poplars, wet dogs, coffee boiling on the fire—these are the Proustian aroma-memories of summer at the lake. To this day, a whiff of poplar will blast me back to “the lake”—the summer lake of memory—long days, sun, water, forest, earth, sky.

Interestingly enough, there is a growing body of evidence that shows how “forest therapy” helps calm us down, improve our concentration, and generally tune us up. A couple of websites you might be interested in: http://www.sunchlorella.com/whats-new/health-news/237.html and http://adifferentkindofdoctor.blogspot.com/2010/10/forest-therapy.html

For me, the smells, sounds and colours of the lake and its forest have always done their magic. Our boys tell us that they cherish the memories of family camping in all its various guises (car-camping and later, when they got older, wilderness canoe camping). They learned about nature, but more importantly, they learned about themselves, and developed some invaluable skills in the process. To this day, Primero can start a fire in a hurricane. Segundo’s surgeon skills were honed at an early age on de-boning jackfish. Tercero can whittle anything out of wood with a Swiss Army Knife—need a small nuclear reactor? No problem. Cuarto can climb any vertical surface—tree, cliff, wall, apartment building—you name it, he will climb it.

I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. And given what they are discovering about the necessity of our urban brains to commune with nature for periodic refreshers, the message takes on importance and urgency. Parents—take your kids camping. Let them see trees and water and creatures. Let them poke sticks in fires and cook things over flames. Let them climb trees and hills and get wet in non-chlorinated water. Let them get dirty and sandy and smeared with pine-sap. Let them experience true dark, actual silence, sunrise and sunset on a natural horizon.

For too many of us now, we do not go into nature and live with it for any length of time. Electronics have become our primary relationships—we experience the world screened by gorilla glass. Everything is virtual. We do not feel, taste, smell, touch, hear the real thing anymore.

Last week Jack and I went camping. Since moving to Vancouver Island, we’ve hardly accessed its wild places at all. Living in the midst of such extravagant beauty has made us complaisant, I guess. Back in Saskatchewan, we had to drive three hours through miles of cultivated and empty fields to get to trees and water. But here, trees and water are everywhere, and we’ve been taking them for granted.

We went to Pacific Rim National Park with Jack’s sister Chloe and her husband Duncan. Jack and Duncan finally got themselves motorcycles a couple of years ago. After decades of Jack mooning after his youthful riding days, I finally gave in and told him to just do it and shut up. After all, the kids are grown up and on their own—those responsibilities are over. Jack also took great pains to research and show me that most motorcycle accidents involve young guys hotdogging it. When I asked him about older guys hotdogging it, he primly replied, “We older guys don't hotdog.” We shall see--for sure, one older guys will not be hotdogging it with me on the back (the bitch seat, as Cuarto's wife Annie calls it--I don't mind--it's not like I've never embodied the behavior at times). And, as Duncan has repeatedly pointed out, “If I go, I’d rather go having fun on a motorcycle.”

So our first real camping trip in years was not in a car, or a VW Westfalia, or with canoes, or kayaks. Or with kids, for that matter. We packed stove, food, tents, sleeping bags, clothes and other sundries for four people on two motorcycles and headed across the Island to the west coast.

It seemed strange, at first, to not have kids in the campsite. It was so quiet. (I think of all those old westerns where the cavalry officer, leading his troop into Indian Country, says “Mighty quiet out there…”, to which some horse-soldier would invariably reply, after squinting and spitting into the mesquite, “Too quiet.”) But there were families with small children in the campground, so we enjoyed shrieks and chattering second hand.

But the smells were there—woodsmoke, pine-sap, poplar spice. And instead of that lakey-water smell, we had the ocean’s underlying tang. And at night, the boom of the waves rumbled beneath the darkness and our dreams. In the morning, we scrambled down the steps to the beach—rolling breakers as far as the eye could see—coming in all the way from Japan, hurling themselves to spume and foam on the buff-coloured sand.

We’ve decided to embrace the adventure of motorcycle travel—it combines camping with road trips—I have always loved road trips, even as a young child. What I like about it is that we’ve never done it before. It is new, and therefore, it is future-oriented. For while writing this blog, and remembering the stories about herding boys through childhood has been a delight for me, sometimes the weight of the past becomes heavy. For those of us firmly in the latter part of our lives, the past is like the submerged part of the ice-berg—bigger than what pokes up over the surface of things. And that weight can, sometimes, immobilize us, or at least restrict our movements.

So, while I plan to continue the “Herding Boys” blog (more stories to share—and each Thanksgiving dinner reveals even more--the familial statute of limitations always relases a few choice ones each year), I am also thinking of starting a new blog for new adventures.

As the four of us sat around the campfire last week, we joked about our geriatric little motorcycle gang—we are greyer, older, less limber, not as fit as we once were. But the spirit is still there. We were willing to sleep on the ground, cook on a stove the size of a tea-cup, walk for hours on sand, sit on stumps, crouch over fires, and forgo showers for a couple of days. We were on a mission to combine something old with something new—communing with nature from the back of motorcycles.

What we realized we’d been missing in our late-middle-aged lives was adventure, the sense of possibility, and future-time. So we are setting out on adventures. Our steeds are bikes. Plus, motorcycle gear is cool.

Stay tuned.